SMACTRA- SMart city ACtivity and TRaffic Acquisition system

The city traffic is growing everywhere and also the necessity to control and manage it. The services are evolving to offer more on-demand possibilities, the first smart vehicles are appearing on the streets and also many other new public transportation solutions. The next generation of smart cities are focused on connected elements that provide instant response to the users and environment necessities.

Extracting more data from the environment is necessary to integrate and automate all the city connected elements leading to improvements in safety, quality of live, cost savings and increase the city overall efficiency.

This IoT based hardware system will enable real time monitoring of its environment, specially focused on pedestrian and vehicle detection in an anonymous way (no one can be identified using those devices). It connects and creates a smart mesh between them to improve its functionality and fidelity (more nodes = more accuracy and performance) giving also the possibility of connecting directly with other nearby devices or vehicles.

The extracted data will be useful for analyzing the vehicle and pedestrian traffic flow patterns so the management of the city resources can be optimized. For example knowing the traffic flow patterns will permit to know how to distribute the traffic, adjust the traffic lights, find in real time the best route or know where some accident happened instantly.

Also this extracted data can be directly shared with nearby vehicles providing extra information about pedestrians or vehicles approaching leading to an increase in road safety. This also applies to smart or autonomous vehicles since one of the limitations of those are its sensors because they can only detect the elements that are on its direct vision.

Current traffic monitoring solutions can’t provide a reliable way to count for vehicles or pedestrians or those are extremely expensive like thermal cameras, floor pressure sensors or cellular signal counters.

This device is small, cheap and designed to be installed in a plug and play fashion so the installation is going to be fast, easy and noninvasive. This way there is practically no need for extra infrastructure since it will use the actual one, more street wiring (thanks to its wireless communications and energy harvesting system) or connectivity solutions leading to more units sold while improving the performance of the system. The devices will be completely integrated and transparent for the actual infrastructures and services.